Major New features

Taxes
You can set your tax rate on the govern screen. Increasing the tax rate will decrease your Civilization's morale

Tourism
Tourism is now calculated by counting up the number of owned tiles a player has, plus the number of owned tiles that are contiguous with the capital planet (so those tiles count as double), and multiplying that against the Tourism bonus on each colony as a percentage

Food
NEW: Arable Land. Most planets have at least 1 arable land tile. Don't worry you can destroy pretty nature and build a parking lot (or SPACE parking lot as we say in the trade). Farms can only be built on arable land. Cities no longer require special resources, just food.

Arable land will not be placed on planets with lower than class 10
Planets with greater than class 12 are likely to have multiple arable land tiles
Arable land generation is separate from other trade resources.

Extreme Worlds

• Extreme planet frequently increased substantially.
• Corrosive Worlds: Can be colonized by Carbon based life but not by Synthetic without tech
• Bacterial Worlds: Can be colonized by Synthetic but not by Carbon without tech
• Frozen worlds: Can now be colonized by Synthetic civs without tech
• Barren worlds: Can now be colonized by Synthetic civs without tech
• Radioactive worlds: Can now be colonized by Silicon civs without tech
  
  

Gameplay
Base Game

• Colony Capitals can now be upgraded to have higher populations
• AI is more likely to request tribute.
• AI will use larger ships for defender class vessels
• AI values trade routes based on wealth rather than pure quantity
• Alliances can expire.
• Adjust size of Anomaly window to fit longer anomaly descriptions and bonuses.
• Added checks to the invasion system to prevent a possible crash
• Minor tweak to music for planet window.
• Crash fix for the case where a personal transport is using a ship design it can't find.
• Fixed a formatting issue is with ship production on the economy screen (extra space)
• Weakened AI fleets will now intelligently regroup behind the lines to reform larger fleets rather than fight to the death.
• AI Supreme Commander now looks at fleets as pieces of a much larger task force.
• Ship maint reduced
• Balance pass on ship hull maint.
• Updated Culture Traits and Improvements to be the same in Base as in Crusade.
• Updated Base Culture improvements to match those in Crusade.
• Galactic Colony Capital now converts 2% of tiles into tourism money
• Normal colony capital now converts 1% of tiles into tourism money
• Space Elevator level up bonus increased from 0.5 to 1.0
• Xeno Factory cost reduced from 200 to 100
• Maintenance introduced for many planetary improvements to balance the new tourism money
• Tourism buildings converted to new system.
• Resistance planet traits changed to military
• Remove durational planetary projects
• Fixed to fix memory overruns which lead to crashes
• Balance pass on ship designs for the AI to generate better ships.
• New AI evaluation system for deciding when to build large ships vs. small ships.
• AI now updates its ship blueprints when a tech is researched rather than every N turns reducing turn times and making the AI smarter.
• Improvements to AI research
• AI is more willing to talk to players it doesn't like.
• AI will talk more to you regarding your evil immoral ways.
• Made AI "dumber" on lower difficulty levels.
• Improved AI researching of extreme planet techs
• AI will give extra defense coverage for its capital world.
• AI is better at stationing defenses around key worlds rather than spreading them evenly.
• AI smarter about how many ships to keep in orbit based on planet class and other factors
• AI smarter about when to build defenders
• AI slightly smarter in handling garrisons
• AI improvements in research choosing
• Better AI constructor navigation late Game
• Better AI fleet size management late Game
• AI more likely to have garrisons on planets.
• AI a lot smarter about trading resources with player to match marketplace pacing.
• Decreased default ai difficulty to beginner
• Proclaiming friendship with someone will make their enemies dislike you more.
• Combat Rating adjustment to be more accurate.
• Stellar Bomber now starts favored by default
• Cosmetic numbering changes for hull sizes (i.e. how many crew they hold)
• Smaller ships now move faster
• Reduced advanced defense costs
• Phasor effect is blue-ish instead of green-ish.
• Most improvements are now destructible
• Modest increase in cost to improvements
• General moving around of improvements in the tech tree to reduce the number of improvements early game to just ones that the player might actually use.
• Reduced starbase maintenance on early modules.
• Reduced starbase mining output to be more balanced.
• Approval growth curve changed to provide more benefits and more penalties for high and low approval
• Capital World now provides 4 morale by default (instead of 2)
• Colonies now start with 3 morale (instead of 1)
• Increased the colony capital raw production default from 1 to 5 to improve early game pacing in the base game.

Precursor Worlds
Reduced credits form anomalies by about 20%

Mercenaries
Happy People mercenary nerfed. Provides 3 morale instead of 5.

Crusade 

• Shared borders without a treaty has greater negative relations impact.
• Central Bank now provides +5 raw wealth
• Hot Springs benefit reduced from +2 to +1
• Pilgrims mission benefit increased.
• Farms no longer have a maintenance cost.
• Eliminated resource costs (other than food) from Cities
• Market Center provides +1 to approval in adjacent bonuses rather than wealth
• Entertainment Networks now provide wealth bonus to adjacent tiles rather than approval
• Reduced the mining power of starbase mining operations (this is to balance the reduced costs of resources elsewhere)
• Balance pass on starbase defense bonuses
• Snuggler Colony gives approval bonus to adjacent tiles. I mean, they're snugglers after all!
• Lots of balance changes to make the technology tree progression more responsive to the player.
• Brutal soldering benefit changed to a %.
• Ideology cost goes up equally in all categories to encourage players to pick an ideology and stick to it.
• Thalan now receive Eminence instead of Star Federation tech for free
• Xenophobic ability now has a substantial influence penalty
• General balance pass through the improvement tree to reduce the amount of resources needed to go with the recent reduction to the mining capabilities.
• Several technologies now provide a percentage bonus to growth
• Legions only require Durantium to train.
• Colony Capital now provides Approval to adjacent improvements
• Colony Capital now provides Population bonus to adjacent improvements
• Most galactic achievements or special improvements now require an exotic resource.
• Interstellar Mining brought forward into the tech tree
• Updated Planetary Defense Dome tech to give a resistance bonus instead of Planetary Defense since since the Planetary Defense stat is no longer used in Crusade.

UI

• Polish pass on the shipyard screen
• Renamed Jamming to Dodge.
• Fixed a case where the Bazaar button tooltip said it was not available when it is
• fixed issue with stat breakdown tooltip and tourism tooltip where it was doubling up multipliers it should've been aggregating
• Fixed several cases where UI was breaking in medium UI
• moved tactical speed to be grouped with other stats under Ship Role on the shipyard screen
  removed Attached Starbases line from shipyard screen
• Fixed issue where the approval breakdown tooltip headers weren't accounting for the unrest and colony limit modifiers
• Added tooltip to "Set Capital" button
• Context window now supports God mode correctly
• Shrink queue in the Planet Window
• Update Favor and Unfavor to Favor ship and Unfavor Ship
• Added max players enforcement (controlled by cap categorized by galaxy size)
• Approval rate displays as a % on the top right instead of just an integer.

Performance
Power consumption tweak for Surface Pro users.
Broad reduction in memory requirements.

Map Sizes

Increased default map size to medium

Update to map sizes for better balance:

• Tiny: 20 to 28 sectors
• Small: 36 to 40 sectors
• Large: 90 to 70 sectors
• Huge: 120 to 90 sectors
• Gigantic: 180 to 120 sectors
• Immense: 250 to 150 sectors

(didn't touch the really big map sizes so the lunatics -- you know who you are -- won't murder me).

Bugs
Base Game

• Typo fixes
• Fixed missing Nebulas in the base game
• Added a fix for galaxy starting without a planet
• Fixed several crashes related to destroying planets
• Crash fix for the case where a ship design is missing a component.
• Fixed exploit whereby the player could potentially trade an AI to an alliance no matter what else was happening
• Fixed issue where it would play the "bought" sound when using the "Build Asteroid Mining Base" hotkey, whether you could afford it or not
• Fixed issue where changing ownership of a station wasn't properly ejecting the other faction's ships from the station
• fixed issue where durational projects were being requested whenever they finished manufacturing
• Added checks and error messages if problems with tech tree
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Precusor Worlds
Fixed a lot of incorrect text descs on the precursor anomaly (says it gives 500 research when it actually only gives 300, etc).

Mercenaries
Fix missed mismatched credit bonus description on the Mercenary The Ysengard, which read 100 credits instead of 25.

Crusade

• Invasion crash fix.
• Custom factions can now get the "Overlord"
• Fixed to fix memory overruns which lead to crashes
• Added code to check to see if a custom faction was loaded in intrigue without a valid tech tree (because crusade was disabled) and tries to fix the tech tree value
• Fixed an issue that caused the game to disable music if you use specified music for an event